Hmmm. I got testicular cancer @ age 21 - right side - swelled up before Christmas 82 to 3x its normal size, misdiagnosed as orchitis, correctly diagnosed a month later and removed surgically (no chemo for me, yay) and I'll tell ya, it was the all the Diet Rite coke and PBJs that I ate at night as a teen that must've done me in.

Its far more likely that HPV or some other virus is responsible for cancers or for triggering them by changing genetic material.

TC is the most common form of cancer for white males (and I'm a white male) 18-35, and I was just damn unlucky, in the sense of getting it - lucky in that I've been cancer free for 28 years. And I still have my spare part and two very cute kids, so I consider myself ever luckier.

Let's assume he DID get substantial pharm assistance, winning the TDF 7x after nearly effin' dying is still a remarkable accomplishment. I spent enough time in the Urology cancer ward, seeing other patients quarantined up with masks and listening to them puke while I recovered from the initial surgery and the follow-up retroperitineal lymphectomy (done in the 80s, but not anymore, as they found out it wasn't increasing survival rates and they in some cases were accidentally cutting the bundles of nerves that control the male happy moment ) to know that making it through chemo (TC, even if its spread, depending on the type of tumor - I had the second most common kind of tumor, but after the most common, which is treatable with radiation, everything else only responds to chemo (and if you have the lovely combo tumor then you get BOTH) is highly curable with decent five year survival rates (I was told with a surgical cure like mine that if I was two years cancer free I was considered pretty much home free) - all parens aside, chemo is biatch, if you can survive feeling like you have a really bad case of flu and fatigue that ebbs and flows for months on end, you are going to have a tolerance for pain and discomfort that makes sitting on a bike feel like a piece of cake...

Anyway, doping is prevalent in nearly all professional sports in many, many forms. Hell, taking supplements can be considered a form of doping if you draw the definition narrowly enough, so I guess my daily multivitamin/fish oil/St. John's Wort, I'm juiced to the gills and I can ride 15 mph ALL DAY people. Turtles are very, very afraid.

Personally, let's let 'em go ahead and advertise the companies that make the dope on their jerseys. Why not? Cycling teams are always having a hard time finding sponsors. Heck, most of Hollywood is doping with HGH and other questionable substances to "look good". Stallone got busted with HGH in Oz and openly admitted that there was no way @ 60 that he could pull off the body to be an action star without it. I'm also guessing that there are a lot of hot 40-50 something actresses that are using HGH figuratively as a body wash so they can continue to be in front of the camera.

But we don't see federal investigators hassling Hollywood figures over drug use that enhances body appearance, do we?

Lance would be left alone had he ridden for a team that didn't take federal money - unless the accountants can somehow prove that the money Postal received was actually not federal in origin - i.e., appropriated by Congress - but money paid to the Postal Service for private shipping services... who knows, I'm not a lawyer, but again, if there had been a viable privately sponsored option for Lance to ride with, I doubt if we'd have all of this whispering (er actually SHOUTING).

Its a compelling story regardless, and as was either pointed out here or in the Washington Post in a recent Robinson column, OK, you take away Lance's titles, then... what do you do with Eddie's? Where they've got pictures of all the speed-induced spittle that was common on the faces of TDF riders in the 60s and 70s when everyone was popping speed to get faster? For that matter, juicing was probably a lot more common in sports like baseball during even Ruth's era, its simply that the press didn't report the private lives of figures like is done today (Ruth was a big time partier, drunk, and lover of food and women, for example) out of respect for the figures' privacy. Hmmm... privacy, what an intriguing concept... but if you had privacy, people like the Kardashians and Paris Hilton wouldn't have "careers"... haha

EDIT: Actually, I do not blame media freaks like the K's, the Lindsays, Paris, there's gotta be some talentless out of control male hacks to put in this line as well, for taking advantage of the whole gossip culture. Its always been there, but with the internet and instant communication and everyone armed with a camera phone its compounded 1000x worse... but we are also participating in picking at the scab by reading, listening, and debating this crap